Bistiza: "Third, you state these rates as though they are high, and yet in my opinion the extremely wealthy should be paying even MORE than either of the numbers you provide. Why? Because while poor people need just about every dime they can scrape just to survive, most of the income of the very wealthy is surplus and is not needed for them to survive. They should be footing far more of the tax bill than they are, and the very poor should be paying nothing or next to nothing."

I know that you're not paying that 35%, or you wouldn't feel that way.

Also, the poor don't pay. 47% of the country. you can live in this michael moore dream world where the rich are cheating the poor, and it's their fault that your life hasn't turned out according to plan. in fact: you're encouraged to live there by your compatriots, apparently.

as far as the rich paying more, they already support the country. at what point do some of YOU need to step up and say, "you know what guys? maybe we need to take responsibility for ourselves and quit leeching from the public coffers."

the rich are not villains. while you were drinking beer and scraping by to get your bachelor's, a lot of them were going to school for 8 or 12 more years than you. a lot of others were working 90 hour work weeks after risking every penny they had to build their companies.

you're not a victim. you get out what you put in with your education and work ethic (and if you're lower socio-economically, you get out hundreds of thousands of dollars more than you put in over the course of your lifetime). apparently, you didn't put in enough. the wealthy who i know did, and now they bear the extra burden of having to support you- not only for food, shelter, and medical care (the majority of medical care; some of this money is spent terribly. ever seen an emergency room in chicago?) which are certainly things that the world would like all people to have, but also for their right to have cell phones with UNLIMITED DATA PACKAGES, and XBOX'S, and CIGARETTES, and ALCOHOL, and LOTTERY TICKETS. if you think that is scraping by, look beyond your utopian backyard: you can't imagine what real suffering is, you myopic twit.

god bless america, because only divine intervention will save your country, as well as the rest of us on this continent who are stupid enough to latch onto your government that has become a ticking........time........bomb.

boom goes the dynamite. i hope china will be kind enough to let you keep your entitlement cigarettes. but, if you want my advice, smoke em while you got em.

Posted by Trentonjoe on 11/7/2012 10:32:00 AM (view original):um, how have my taxes gone up? You know, because they haven't.

Do you have kids? Are you married?

Just off the top, January 1st, my taxes will rise by $1500+.

Do you use an FSA for your medical expenses (if you don't, you should). If you spend more than $2500, your taxes are going up.

The medicine cabinet tax, the HSA withdrawal tax hike, and many others.

Coming soon (likely): since employers will be reporting their health care premium contribution for you, the way is paved for taxes to be implemented on those benefits as income. This is your ultimate path to single-payer system, which Obama has been a supporter of all along.

Indirect effect of policies through ACA:

Do you use durable medical equipment (like a C-PAP)? Providers' taxes went up --> 2.3% excise tax for equipment >$100.

Is your insurance company REQUIRED to cover things it didn't before? Mine is. Premiums for the same coverage for my family have gone up 43% for 2013 over this year.

Yours may not have gone up for whatever reason, but I'm your basic middle class guy with a family and even though I got a reasonable raise, my buying power decreases dramatically and my taxes are going up. Even more when the fiscal cliff comes.

"Not one dime if you make over $250K"

Preposterous. Huge lie. Huge.

We have just started the enrollment period for my company's healthcare benefits. A direct quote from the enrollment package:

Is that your share of the premium, or the overall premium? Some companies hit their employees harder when this happens (i.e. they might increase their share of the burden by some percentage, and your share by more).

I wanted to look this up before I gave a definitive answer.

My contribution for medical for my current plan (which I will be retaining) is increasing by 8.5%. I have no idea how much my company's contribution is changing. But this is an 8.5% increase out of my paycheck every pay period.

Which makes me wonder when the "affordable" part of the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" will actually kick in (if ever).

Posted by dahsdebater on 11/7/2012 3:18:00 PM (view original):Bistiza, you do a lot of talking about your background and constantly refuse to actually mention it. Frankly, you sound like some idealistic college kid. You are by far the most delusional person I've discussed with on these forums in years. I think you saying anyone would be shocked by your background, but you won't talk about it, is the most baseless and unimpressive statement so far, and that's saying something.

He could tell you but he'd have to kill you.

Or he'd bore you to death with an essay that never really gets to the point.

Bis, your view doesn't work for a whole bunch of reasons, but I'm going to pick one: it's not a static situation. The rich already do pay a vast majority of the burden. They (and you) also react to conditions that change - like rates. If their rates are lowered and they are incentivized to create more wealth (a good thing), their income and gains go up. The net effect is to pay more in aggregate dollars. It also happens that when across the board rates have been cut the share of the burden shifts even more to the rich. As I mentioned in a previous post, all of this information is researchable from a non-biased website: the IRS. You claim your view "makes logical sense", but you know what? It doesn't work that way in reality. You don't have to change your view, as you say, but you also can ignore what history has shown and believe in your logic (which really appears more like intuition). As always, that part is up to you.

You simply can't have it both ways. If you want higher rates, you may, depending on risk/reward get less from them. As a reductio ad absurdum, what do you think happened to production back when the highest marginal rates were 90%? If you think people kept producing at the same rate they did when the marginal rate was 40%, you'd be obviously mistaken. If you want higher rates, guess what, the rich have opportunities to start or move businesses elsewhere. They don't exist in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure you know that, but you are not demonstrating that with your posts.

You seem like an educated person. But real world knowledge seems to be a little absent, at least with respect to economics.

"If you charge the same rates everywhere in the country, the only option they have is to go out of the country. A few may do that, but most won't because it is the U.S. that helps make them successful in many cases (for reasons that go well beyond the tax code)."

::head meet desk::

Companies move to do business where business conditions are favorable. We live in a global economy, but even so you can still see examples within the US of the same behavior that applies just by looking at states. Boeing moving a large part of their operations out of business unfriendly Washington to go to places like Kansas and South Carolina. Auto companies building cars in Alabama. Why do they do that? More favorable business condtions. Taxes and regualations are a huge part of those conditions. If it's more favorable for Intel to manufacture processors in Ireland and Israel, they open up plants there.

Just today Boeing announces layoffs and plant closures in California, quickly becoming one of the tougher places to run businesses.

You can create all the wealth you want but if it doesn't increase consumer spending it won't drive the economy anywhere but into the ground.<<<

I've demonstrated no such thing. I've simply provided a counter weight to your Keynesian Economic assertions. The Keynesian model, which focuses on aggregate demand and government (or public sector) intervention is one of many theories and the primary theory competing against supply side models. Just because it's the theory you follow doesn't in turn mean that I don't know economics because I don't agree with the model. More fallacious logic.

>>>In these terms, jobs function to provide people with money to spend. <<<<

Jobs don't function to give people money to spend. They function so that producers can produce their goods and services in the attempt to make a profit. The by-product of this is that people who work end up with money to spend (they sell their own service to the producer for their own wealth creation).

For the record, here is what I mean by weatlh creation being the engine:

The efficient production of goods and services that meet with the demand for those goods and services drive markets (and pricing). Wealth is created by producers who meet the market demand with goods and services in an efficient manner. The motivation for meeting those demands is driven by the desire of the producers to create weatlh. The creation of wealth creates demand of more goods and services by those with wealth and those with jobs (sometimes one and the same).

That's the 20-second summary of a potentially much longer winded post. And since I deeply care that my buddy Mike reads my posts, I'm keeping it brief.